Search Results
Without Immigration, U.S. Economy Will Struggle to Grow
Slowing labor force growth is the product of a number of factors—the aging of the U.S. population, retiring baby boomers and declining birth rates. But another element is immigration.
Working Paper
Immigrant Misallocation
We quantify the barriers that impede the integration of immigrants into foreign labor markets and investigate their aggregate implications. We develop a model of occupational choice with natives and immigrants of multiple types whose decisions are subject to wedges which distort their allocation across occupations. We estimate the model to match salient features of U.S. and cross-country individual-level data. We find that there are sizable GDP gains from removing the wedges faced by immigrants in U.S. labor markets, accounting for approximately one-fifth of the overall economic contribution ...
Spanish-Speaking Growth in Texas Reinforces Need to Close Education Gaps
The Eleventh Federal Reserve District has the second-largest native Spanish-language population in the Federal Reserve System. That population will grow further as the number of Hispanics exceeds 20 million in Texas alone by 2050.
Working Paper
The Impact of Limiting Applicant Information on Rental Housing Discrimination
Policies that reduce information on applicants (e.g., limiting criminal history) have mixed results in the labor market. However, little is known about their impact in the housing market. We submitted fictitious email inquiries to publicly advertised rentals using names manipulated on perceived race and ethnicity before and after a policy that restricted the use of background checks, eviction history, income minimums, and credit history in rental housing applications in Minneapolis. After the policy was implemented, discrimination against African American and Somali American men increased. ...
Journal Article
Immigration Shortfall May Be a Headwind for Labor Supply
U.S. labor markets are currently experiencing unprecedented labor shortages. Reduced immigration flows in recent years have contributed to these labor supply shortages and tightened labor markets. Industries, occupations, and regions that rely more heavily on foreign workers have been particularly affected.
Global Perspectives: Glenn Hubbard on Immigration, Economic Dynamism and Limits of Monetary Policy
Hubbard and Dallas Fed President Rob Kaplan discussed his experiences working in the George W. Bush administration and immigration's impact on the workforce.
Working Paper
Harmonized Population and Labor Force Statistics
The official labor force statistics often exhibit discontinuities in January, when updated population estimates are incorporated into the Current Population Survey (CPS) for the current year but are not revised backward through history. We construct harmonized population estimates spanning five decades and produce new weights for the CPS microdata that are benchmarked to these estimates. Using these weights, we estimate harmonized labor force statistics that reflect the latest available information about the population and its characteristics. The harmonized labor force series are free from ...
Working Paper
The Indirect Fiscal Benefits of Low-Skilled Immigration
Low-skilled immigrants indirectly affect public finances through their effect on native wages & labor supply. We operationalize this general-equilibrium effect in the workhorse labor market model with heterogeneous workers and intensive and extensive labor supply margins. We derive a closed-form expression for this effect in terms of estimable statistics. We extend the analysis to various alternative specifications of the labor market and production that have been emphasized in the immigration literature. Empirical quantifications for the U.S. reveal that the indirect fiscal benefit of one ...
Working Paper
Immigrants in the U.S. labor market
Immigrants supply skills that are in relatively short supply in the U.S. labor market and account for almost half of labor force growth since the mid-1990s. Migrant inflows have been concentrated at the low and high ends of the skill distribution. Large-scale unauthorized immigration has fueled growth of the low-skill labor force, which has had modest adverse fiscal and labor market effects on taxpayers and U.S.-born workers. High-skilled immigration has been beneficial in most every way, fueling innovation and spurring entrepreneurship in the high tech sector. Highly skilled immigrants have ...